Stmt on ICANN Travel Proposal to Fund Half of GNSO to Participate

[Milton L Mueller]

Robin:

Great work, a few proposed edits below

 

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Statement of the NCUC on ICANN's Travel Funding Proposal

 

          ICANN is currently revisiting its policy on providing support
for travel expenses. Currently, ICANN supports the travel of the ICANN
Board, ALAC officers, NomCom, and NomCom appointees to supporting
organizations, including the GNSO.  GNSO Council members appointed by
the constituencies have not been supported. The travel expenses of the
councilors of these organizations are inherent costs of ICANN's work,
and paying these expenses should be a priority use of ICANN's resources.
Currently ICANN is subsidized by volunteer councilors who provide not
only their personal time and effort, but also the funds to travel to
meetings on the other side of the world.  

 

          This change is especially important as the GNSO moves to
restructure its constituencies and strives to increase participation by
individuals.  High costs present a bar to participation.  Those costs
may well seem reasonable or incidental to those parties who have a large
direct financial interest in ICANN policy, but they are
disproportionately burdensome to individuals and non-commercial parties
who seek the promote the public interest within ICANN.  Since NCUC is
the only constituency not supported by commercial interests and large
industries, the under-funding of the GNSO has been the single most
significant barrier to NCUC participation in ICANN policy making.  ICANN
is financially self-sufficient and should bear the costs of its own
operation.  Otherwise, only those who can routinely pay thousands of
dollars to participate in policy discussions will be able to influence
ICANN policy-making.

 

          ICANN should fund the reasonable travel expenses of all GNSO
councilors, who are all needed to carry out ICANN's policy work.  The
current proposal to pay the travel expenses of half of the councilors is
both insufficient and potentially divisive and discriminatory.  Funding
some of the councilors leaves the process open to gamesmanship and
favoritism; it also waste's the Council's time by giving it another
contentious decision to make.  Face-to-face council meetings are
essential to the work of the GNSO, and the expense of keeping the GNSO
running is as much a cost of ICANN's operation as the travel expenses of
the Board or SO chairs. 

 

The Internet community would not accept a policy in which only half of
the board members were funded to participate in board meetings, but
ICANN proposes providing support for only half of the GNSO Council to
participate in policy meetings.  The GNSO is supposed to represent all
of the various stake-holders or interest groups who belong at the table
in Internet policy negotiations.  As the supposedly "bottom-up" part of
ICANN, the GNSO should be a fully-funded and fully-supported
organization within ICANN.  Otherwise, all the talk about "bottom up"
policymaking at ICANN is empty rhetoric meant only for press releases,
while the same commercial and governmental interests continue to
dominate actual policy decisions.

 

 

 

 

 

IP JUSTICE

Robin Gross, Executive Director

1192 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA  94117  USA

p: +1-415-553-6261    f: +1-415-462-6451

w: http://www.ipjustice.org     e: robin at ipjustice.org





 

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